00:00:00.000Now, what I think is in the minds often of people who ask this question, many people ask it from a good place.
00:00:05.940You know, they really feel sorry for a girl in this situation and think, I just can't bring myself to be pro-life in that situation.
00:00:12.860For other people, it's like a distraction, right?
00:00:14.760It's like, let's think of the worst, most rare possible situation and use that to argue for abortion for any reason.
00:00:20.880But let's assume there's a sincere person asking this.
00:00:25.060There's a concern about her psychological well-being.
00:00:28.620But what we often get into the habit of thinking is, if she just has an abortion, it solves the problem.
00:00:36.720She doesn't have to go through this psychologically torturous situation of, you know, being pregnant and then giving to a birth as an 11-year-old child and so on.
00:00:44.960We can just have an abortion and get rid of all of that.
00:00:47.900The problem with that intuition and that line of thinking is that that's just not reality.
00:00:52.280There is no world in which you can save a girl who has been in this situation from significant mental trauma.
00:01:01.180She has been the victim of incest, usually, and certainly the victim of rape at 11 years old.
00:01:07.420There is no solution in the world that is going to just clear that up and make things better.
00:01:12.440So the question is not how can we just eliminate that suffering, because that's just crazy.
00:01:17.000And if you tell an 11-year-old girl we can get rid of the problem, you're lying to her and you're betraying her.
00:01:22.920The question is, what is the solution that is going to give her the least suffering and that is going to help her the most?
00:01:30.600And when you frame it that way and you're actually realistic about the alternatives that we can give to a woman or a girl in this horrendous situation, it's far less obvious that abortion is the answer.
00:01:42.560As I said, we know that abortion has significant mental health problems on average for a woman who chooses it compared to a woman who continues an unwanted pregnancy.
00:01:51.360We know that girls, teenagers, or even preteens who have abortions are even higher risk for mental health problems as a result of their abortion.
00:02:02.960Having an abortion at 14 years old or even earlier is a huge trauma that has significant mental health problems for a girl or a teenager in that situation.
00:02:14.240And so all that to say, there's no easy way out, but actually the evidence suggests that an abortion will make things worse than they already are.
00:02:23.900There's no way we can magically make things better, but abortion is going to make things worse.
00:02:29.020And so, yes, the woman is going to have this trauma.
00:02:32.640The girl is going to have this trauma.
00:02:46.180A woman who is the victim of rape or the victim of incest who doesn't get pregnant.
00:02:50.960How is she going to feel and what can we do for her?
00:02:54.460Well, abortion isn't on the table because she's not pregnant, but the woman or the girl is still experiencing this profound trauma and grief and suffering from what she's been through.
00:03:05.280It's clear when you think about it that way that abortion is not the solution.
00:03:11.540The problem is the trauma that she's had because she has been a victim of rape or incest at a very young age in particular.
00:03:18.760And that makes it all the more obvious, I think, that abortion is not the solution because pregnancy is not the fundamental problem.
00:03:24.940When you finally do look at women in this situation and you ask them what helped, there's actually a good book.
00:03:32.480And this is the last thing I'll say, because it's very easy to sit here with me as a guy talking who's never been through this, never will go through this and think, how could he really know?
00:03:42.200How could he possibly know and how could he elaborate and pontificate about what a woman or girl would actually think in this?
00:03:52.420There's a book called Victims and Victors by an author called a researcher called David Reardon, which actually asks those women themselves, these girls and women who have been the victim of incest or rape.
00:04:02.540And it followed them through. And about half of them had an abortion, actually less than half of them had an abortion.
00:04:08.320Most of them actually kept the baby. And so he then asked the women or the girls, how do you feel about the abortion?
00:04:15.160How do you feel about keeping the baby?
00:04:17.320Now, what he found was that when he actually let these women and girls speak for themselves, you actually didn't get a clear pro-abortion or pro-choice message.
00:04:26.460Yes, a lot of them who had abortions said it was the right choice, but many of them said it was the wrong choice.
00:04:31.740They said abortion took away the only thing that could have given me healing in that situation.
00:04:36.740They said the one thing that gave me hope or light at the end of the tunnel was that life.
00:04:42.440And abortion took that away. The only thing abortion did was it added a second trauma to the victim and it added a second victim to the crime.
00:04:51.940Whereas, by contrast, the women who kept the baby in that situation, every single one said it was the right decision and it was the number one thing that helped me to heal from that trauma.
00:05:03.080So, again, you know, the main thing I say to people on this question is you don't have to listen to me.
00:05:07.940And I get it if you don't want to. But listen to the women who have actually experienced that.
00:05:12.460And I guarantee you, when you listen to their voices and you don't exploit their stories, their answers will actually point much more towards life as part of the solution than it will towards abortion.
00:05:24.040What do you say when they come at you and say, but there's so many kids in foster care?
00:05:29.920Don't you care about the kids in foster care?
00:05:32.020So there's a lot of things to say about that.
00:05:34.500The first is that abortion actually hasn't solved that problem at all.
00:05:39.260When you look at the number of unwanted pregnancies and unwanted children, that number has not fallen since abortion was legalized.
00:05:47.100As just one example of this, they said, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, if we legalize abortion, there'll be no more problem of single motherhood because of women who gets...
00:06:01.560Right. Like, anyone knows the number. Like, if you think that single motherhood has been, like, has fallen since abortion was legalized, like, you're living in a dream world.
00:06:10.780But it was supposed to be the solution because, you know, if a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock or without the guy around, she can just have an abortion.
00:06:19.640But we know that it's got way, way more of an issue since then.
00:06:25.600Those are the supposedly unwanted children.
00:06:27.680That's like a measure of unwanted children, at least traditionally.
00:06:30.260And that got far worse of a problem after abortion was legalized.
00:06:35.560And so when you look at the statistics on child abuse, children in care, all of these things, it's very far from obvious that any of them have got better since abortion was legalized.
00:06:45.860Now, there's a whole load of other things you could say.
00:06:48.440You could point out the fact that it's almost impossible to adopt a newborn baby.
00:06:53.040Any baby, you know, if you're thinking about abortion and you decide to give birth to the baby instead, or even if you're forced to give birth to the baby instead, that baby will be adopted in a heartbeat.
00:07:04.560There will be 10 couples waiting for every single baby in that situation.
00:07:10.460There was an article a few years ago in the UK saying that, like, the, what was it, the waiting list to adopt a newborn baby is about nine years.
00:07:45.460I'm just thinking about crackhead moms.
00:07:46.820Yeah, no, they'll get pregnant, and then the state will take them away five years later, and then no one wants a kid that's been like—
00:07:54.180Well, so this is normally what happens—I don't know if it's necessarily drug users in particular, but this is what normally happens for children.
00:08:00.160Yeah, when I—sorry, when I say crackhead, I don't just mean crackhead.
00:08:41.840So the number—so people will say, you know, there's thousands of kids in care, but when you ask how many of those kids are actually available to be adopted,
00:08:52.220they won't know, because it—and they should know, because it's actually a small minority.
00:08:56.780So, you know, adoption is actually not the solution to most of this, because most of them are not available to adopt.
00:09:04.160The ones that are, like I said, are these kids who were never going to be aborted, even if it was available.
00:09:12.260These are families that wanted the kid and then were later unable to care for them.
00:09:16.440So what normally happens when you ban abortion is—or, you know, limit access to it is most people actually just change their behavior,
00:09:23.420and they don't get pregnant in the first place.
00:09:27.340The men who don't want babies get vasectomies.
00:09:29.580We saw the vasectomy rate massively increased after Roe v. Wade was overturned, because people take responsibility.
00:09:35.420They say, okay, now we don't have abortion as a backup, let's actually change when we're going to have sex,
00:09:41.980and we'll only have sex without contraception when we're ready to have a baby.
00:09:46.380So most of those babies just aren't born.
00:09:48.140You don't get the unintended pregnancy, and that's a win-win situation because there are fewer teen pregnancies, fewer unwanted pregnancies.